TV and Books: A.I. In The Last Days

Last updated on August 30, 2025

TV and Books: AI In The Last Days

DVD Series, The Final Countdown: Tribulation Rising – The AI Invasion, Volume 3

Pastor Billy Crone shares how AI has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives, including data, business and finance, homes and cities, shopping, robots, entertainment, media, gaming, agriculture, communication, education, medicine, transportation, police, military, and religion.

As demonstrated in The Final Countdown: Tribulation Rising, the AI Invasion, AI can now write and perform symphonies. I’ve read that AI can write book chapters but apparently cannot yet write a complete book—the program crashes before it finishes (as do many wannabe authors), but it’s coming.

From personal experience in communications, closed captioning by humans is being replaced by programs like Dragon. However, the one area where AI cannot equal human ability in captioning is sports. Except in the case of studio reporting, sports captioning is unscripted. Local and national news are scripted except in emergency broadcasts, and all news in America is disseminated by five or six companies, depending on who you believe. So, it’s not that difficult for a bot to caption the news.

I have been a broadcast captioner for 25 years, and I have seen the progression of newscasts where news that airs at 5 pm on the East Coast is verbatim the same feed that is captioned three hours later on the West Coast.

Perhaps the only reason I still have a job in captioning is that, for the last decade, the bulk of my work has been sports captioning. AI cannot caption sports with the accuracy desired by most respected sports stations, like ESPN. When you think of the countries of origin for players, i.e., like hockey, they often have Russian and French names; many baseball players have Latino names; and soccer players can come from anywhere on the planet, AI can’t spell those names on the fly.

A human creates a dictionary of briefs, and the captioner writes according to how he has entered those names in his dictionary. This allows for almost perfect captioning, depending on the captioner’s skills.

I wouldn’t have survived as a captioner this long in a declining job market if I hadn’t been captioning sports. Many captioners don’t like sports. Achieving competency in sports requires more skill and prep time, but I see the writing on the wall. I know what’s coming. And it’s everywhere. It’s happening in every area of society. However, most people don’t notice its intrusion into their lives until it affects them personally.

Is there a positive side to AI? Absolutely. There are many benefits, but my concern is how AI is used. One example of how I benefited from AI was in creating my latest audiobook, God’s Good Works: Stories to Treasure and Tales to Ponder. I used Amazon and a virtual voice to narrate my entire 300-page book. I didn’t have to pay a dime to the virtual voice (or Amazon), and the corrections could be made with instant feedback. Overall, I was pleased with the voice, how quickly I could finish the audiobook, and the quality.

While I benefited from AI in this case, that virtual voice took a job away from an audiobook producer I would have hired and paid several hundred dollars, not counting the time involved in screening applicants and proofreading their work. Humans make more mistakes than AI, so it’s a much more intensive process to work with a human to create audiobooks than using a virtual voice.

While I was satisfied with the virtual voice for nonfiction, would it also work for fiction? I’m not sure. But I’ve heard from at least one other author that it doesn’t—the voice doesn’t know when to show excitement, sadness, or “humanness.” Neither does a virtual voice have true human emotion (but I could tell Amazon is working on this).

As with everything, we must decide where to draw the line in allowing AI into our lives. Some people want nothing to do with AI. Others love it. I, for one, am still evaluating. But I also know, whether I like it or not, it’s here to stay. And in some ways, that is a scary proposition. If AI takes over half of the available jobs in the next decade, you or I will be unemployed!

While that sounds depressing, if we keep a balanced perspective, we can still live life to the fullest, enjoying the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living and busying ourselves with His Good Works.

To read more stories like this, check out my latest book, God’s Good Works: Stories to Treasure and Tales to Ponder, by clicking here.

Available as an audiobook on Audible by clicking here.

See Lorilyn’s website for more devotionals/op-eds like this one by clicking here.